Offsite Comments

Pete: "The War Against Good Cops - Call me a racist, I don't care. The sight of these filthy apes committing violence with no remorse or conscience just because they feel like it turns my insides over."

You' racis'!!

Well, hey, you said to.

Just the "apes" part is of course not PC, harking as it does to the language of truly racist beliefs and attitudes of the past. "apes"? eek! trigger warning!! But I'll bet, just a hunch mind you, but I'll bet Pete would employ the same word just as readily for any-color group behaving in this way, and would not mean to include, say, Dr. Carson or Thomas Sowell or Lt Col Allen West. Any civilized person would feel the same about such conscienceless anarchy!

The ironicallike part, of course, is, these are not just any riotous mobs, but utterly racist mobs. They're all about keeping the divisions churning and the racist group-identity think going. Despicable. Yet somehow not un-PC!

I liked the suggestion someone on Ace had, for when your Starbux barrista brings up the subject of race relations, as their timid VP suggested. Respond angrily with, "Race is a social construct! Why are you such a hater?" Not that I ever go to Starbux, but I liked it.

Michelle Obama’s mother was worried about her daughter marrying a biracial man

"Typical black person." To paraphrase the racist in chief.

cth: "...We finally got internet briefly..."

I keep coming back to that line. I think it's hilarious. As the saying goes, I do not understand those words in that order! Briefly?? How could you not have the ubiquitous Intrawebz?? howl the young'n's. It's as if you said, yeah, we tried that new-fangled electricity stuff for a few days….

I had been on CompuServe. They (finally) opened up an email portal to the net. Through that email portal, a correspondent friend kept encouraging me to "get on the web." (Thanks, Matt!) I did not get it, though, until CompuServe opened its own web adjunct, SpryNet.com. That's when I finally left the sheltered confines of CS and launched out into the ungoverned seas of teh innertubes.

The URL for the first Mindful home page was something like home.sprynet.com/~mindful.

CompuServe, always just a side business of H&R Block, was becoming buggy whips in the motorcar age, so as they burned out, they sold SpryNet to MindSpring.

MindSpring had a big ceremony about how the companies were "merging," when they got gobbled up by Earthlink. Then Mindspring vanished for good.

Throughout, I kept my original URL (and mindful@sprynet.com email).

IIRC, it was with Earthlink that slow-learner I finally registered the mindfulwebworks.com domain. Eventually, I changed hosts, dropped Earthlink, and lost the original SpryNet website. By then, it was nothing but pages redirecting to the domain, but, lost those historic weblinks. Somewhere, out there in webland, on some ancient webpage, someone clicks a link to my SpryNet site, and gets a 404. *sads*

Earliest graphics and webpages, I worked hard to make sure they were 16-color, low-bandwidth friendly, and CGA viewable. Later, I figured 256-color and VGA were common. Nowadays, anyone with a blog can embed hi-res videos and most folks can run them on their HD cells and laptops. Hi-res immersion interactive game-playing is a common thing! I've built self-reproducing virtual chickens in Second Life! (Answer: Chicken came first.) A long way from my first web pages!

What will it all be like in another 20 years, Gods willing and Ragnarok don' rise?

Vic: "I have heard that the strata in OK has a hard stone layer you have to blast through to dig a storm shelter so they are very expensive."

Well, some places. Not others. The lastest thing is above-ground, usually retrofitted in-home shelter rooms. They work.

It's always amazed me humanity builds so poorly. Stick houses in tornado country; flimsy buildings in earthquake areas; beach houses on sticks facing hurricanes. California mansions on a mudslide cliff.

I suppose it's playing the odds / avoid the up-front expenses because it's cheaper to rebuild kind of thinking. It does make sort-of sense with tornaodes. Terrible as they are, your odds of being in one are relatively small. Which is real comforting when your belongings are scattered across a couple of square miles.

I live pretty safe from 'naders, in an old concrete house in a bit of a valley, above the flood lines, too. IAC, I'll take my chances against some little ol' Okie whirlwind vs one of those monster hurricane thingys.

Carol, before you make your final decision to become a Texan, consider this quaint little chateau in Oklahoma City. (Will only set you back $2mil.) I'd bet you'd really enjoy the kaleidoscopic bathroom.

http://bit.ly/okc-manse

(There are cheaper homes in Okla. )

Vic: "...My question is how will they make sure that these 16 year olds do not vote in the federal elections? Are they giving out two ballots?..."

I had similar questions. Might just have to quit counting California votes as valid. Also, votes from states that disregard citizenship requirements. Also, "marriages" from certain states....

The Becoming-Untied States of America.

Morning, Glories!

Before I launch in to reading...

Congrats and thanks to Andy for providing timely morning posts.

Now, to the news & views.

Enough lurking. Must sleep. Good night, Gracies!

Greetings. Checking in. How's the party going?

I understand Netenyahu just barely managed to squeek by with a bare landslide. I'll bet the SCOAMF was a big help in that.

#85 - Good gawd the NYT is whorrible!

"...merciless booting [typo] is when one is half smothered by Kate Upton's or Charlotte Mckinney's cleavage..."

Yes, "booting" evokes entirely other cleavage than does "boobing" ...

Good Way To Lose Your Job link:

My! That's even worse than the gal who griped on the Twitters about her new job, and her new boss replied by firing her.

"...neighbors described him as a gentle soul with two small dogs that he dotes upon. ...grieving since his girlfriend passed away three years ago...."

Hmmm.

Best part of staying in a hotel link:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants hotels to monitor how much time its guests spend in the shower.

The agency is spending $15,000 to create a wireless system that will track how much water a hotel guest uses to get them to "modify their behavior."

The EPA is in the behavior modification business. Well nothing new in that, I guess.

Burn the EPA
Scatter its bones
Salt the earth where it stood

The day moves on, eh?

Ronald Reagan: PROUD to Be IRISH
at Reaganite Republican
Great photo of RR.
Trigger warning: also pic of Tip O'Neill

http://bit.ly/RR-Irish

I have to register my indignation, my outrage at the way the Irish are portrayed in comments here as rowdy drunks. I would hope that in this day and age we could transcend such cruel stereotypes which demean the soul of these fine people, with whom I have shared so many a glass of beer and shot of whiskey in bars in Chicago. hic

Top o' the morning t' ye, Glories! All Milady's family are Chicago Irish Catholic. So, I guess, are my kids - Irish, anyway; we're not so Catholic and certainly not Chicago anymore. I'm Irish by marriage.

But it's not all deprivation and destitution in Oklahoma, like that OKC house. Why, right here in the old home town, we have an actual amusement park with the famous "FireBall" roller coaster. If you can handle the thrills and chills of a major roller-coaster ride, here's POV video from start to finish. (0:53, coaster2coaster, on YouTube)

Wellll, okay, it's called the "Kiddie Park," and the 'coaster is called "Little Fire Ball" - I don't know if there's a Big Fire Ball. This donation-supported wonderland has not been allowed to age. The merry-go-round has recently been rehabbed. Vandals have molested the rides, but the community undoes their damage every time. Not even Nature's forces: there is a post in the park, with a mark at (asking Milady) 8 to 12 feet above the ground, showing where the waters rose to in the big flood of Oct '86. (That's when we were watching the news in Chicago and saw areal shots showing how the place had become three islands, and police were getting here to there by boat. Funny place, the dust bowl.) They hosed the park down, oiled and painted, and fired back up, I think by Summer '87.

The Kiddie Park has been maintained, practically unchanged, since my grandfather took me there as a youngster, and is dear to the hearts of generations of folks who grew up here. And the parents who bought them popcorn and cotton candy and put them to bed at night all tuckered out. From that roller coaster ride.

Does this bathroom hark back to the Dumbo flying elephants on parade sequence discussion the other day? Oh, no, I know, the kaleidoscopes discussion.

Bringing you more of the excitement of living in the middle of America, here's a quaint little cabin down in Oklahoma City that would only set a person back two mil. [KOCO]

Thanks, but, um [puts on techie webmaster wizard's hat], If you have problems commenting, I'd like some detail, 'cause there's no Disqus-like or other comment service, just me & my content mgmt system (cms). You could email me at webworker at my website.

Presuming you weren't being spam-blocked… First thought is, y'gotta have javascript on, but I 'spect you know that. There is a second layer, which is you have to click on the word "comments" to open up the comments area. Did you get that far?

My site dates back to the ancient pre-Interactive days of the interewebs, when content just sat there to be consumed and commenting was for email. It's a one-man show running this new cms thingy in recent years, too. Therefore, I only opened up for comments relatively recently, and with much trepidation for both how to handle them and what might be commented, but mostly it's been empty-room echoey (blessing counted).

I'm never sure if I've set all the levers & gears in the right way, but this is the first I've heard of a problem. The spammers can leave messages (the ones that slip past my spam-filter service). And bob and Ting and a very few others got through. If they can do it… :D

(Heh - This may be the incentive for this webslacker to actually look at the site again. For the 19th anniversary tomorrow.)

Yes, I was trying to be funny, but I presume with these Nanny services, somebody chooses the parameters, and those parameters are more about politikal korrectness than about what you'n'I might consider objectionable. Maybe you're right about the "lesser Wordpress sites" algorithm, but I would think the site was more likely specifically on a hit list.

Such lists may have to let some of the Bigger sites in by demand, but can widely block others. Wouldn't want to block any pre-teen access to sexual indulgence information; don't want to discourage their youthful exploration. But we will shield them from infection with sites pushing Constitutionalism or Morality.

Thanks for checking out the Tumblr smut access, in the interests of science, by the way. :D

JJS:

"...in the camps, if you didn't understand German or Yiddish, it could be life or death..."

"Ma, I learned a foreign language - English!"

Amazing range of emotion evoked by your brief paragraphs. Appropriately.